The Well
by Xanrivash
Summary: No matter how dark and ugly everything seems, there is no such thing as a world completely devoid of beauty...except one.
1. The Tainted World

"...There's something wrong here."

"What, you mean the fact that we're not chilling at home, instead of slogging our way through yet another generic medieval forest to another generic medieval town in the hopes that there may be enough Heartless around to make it less than a complete waste of time?"

"Besides that," Demyx said with a scowl, not wanting to put up with any of Axel's sass right at that moment. "What the hell do you take me for? I meant there's something wrong with the world."

"There's something wrong with your head, is more likely," Roxas said, giving Demyx a shove that was probably meant to be playful but came across as simply aggressive. "It's just another boring, same-old, outdated world. Only probably more so."

"So was Angrejar," Demyx muttered under his breath, kicking at a rock. He'd hoped to unearth some sort of interesting creature, but all he found was more dirt, which didn't improve his mood any, or alleviate his sense that something was deeply wrong. "And didn't Angrejar turn out to be just the most boring, unexciting -"

"Shut up!" Roxas snapped with real venom, giving him a harder shove; Demyx had to grab his arm and threaten to give it a nasty twist to dissuade him. "This is just another stupid, boring world! If there was anything that screwed up here, don't you think that maybe, you know, someone _else_ might notice it?"

"Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence in my intelligence," Demyx growled, releasing Roxas's arm and resisting the urge to give him a shove in return. "Maybe, just maybe, I'm paying just a little bit more attention than either of you."

"Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence in _our_ intelligence," Axel snarled, glowering at both of them, but Demyx slightly more so. "Demyx, you're imagining shit, got it memorized? Now both of you shut your mouths so we can actually get this damn mission finished instead of standing around bitching all day."

Demyx scowled even deeper and kicked another rock, again revealing nothing but dirt. "Something crawled up both your asses and died this morning."

The rock ended up rolling to Axel's feet, and Axel picked it up and flung it in some other direction. "Same shit that keeps coming out of your mouth, I'd say."

"Douchebag..." Feeling like this subtly screwed-up world was somehow affecting his best friends and turning them both into complete jerks, Demyx kicked over yet another rock, revealing still more dirt, and flung it deeper into the woods himself. "You wouldn't know shit if you stepped in it. Time was, the two of you actually came close to giving one about what I said and thought. What happened to that?"

"You lost your mind, is what," Roxas said, throwing a rock in Demyx's general direction. It missed by a mile, but it was the thought that counted.

"Throw another rock at me and I'm gonna make you eat it, all right?" Demyx snapped, then paused suddenly, taking a moment to think about how hostile they were all being all of a sudden. Were they all just having a bad day right then, or was this part of whatever was just not right with this world...? "Seriously, you guys weren't such pisswads before we left the castle."

"You weren't fuckin' hallucinating before we left the castle, either!"

"Yeah, if you're so utterly convinced that there's something horribly wrong with this world, why don't you do something novel like, I dunno, _explain what the hell it is?"_

Demyx sighed, rubbing his forehead - by the time Roxas started swearing, things were really going downhill in a hurry. How was he going to convince them...? "Look, I'm sorry, but I really don't know how to explain it," he sighed, trying to keep his own temper and vocabulary in check. "I just...ever since we got here, I've just had the sense that...something is very wrong with this world. Something subtle, but...deep. I dunno what else to call it, but something is _really_ wrong here. And...you know what? We should just...Gods damn it, we have to get out of here. This world is...I dunno, toxic or something. The longer we -"

All of a sudden, he found himself flat on the ground with an aching face, and Axel towering over him. "Look, you stupid chickenshit," Axel ground out, jabbing a finger in Demyx's face as if it was a gun he wanted to shoot him with. "_I_ am the senior man on this mission. Not you. And I am not going to scrub the Goddamn mission just because you decided you'd rather sit on your ass at the castle and play sitar all day than go out and do a little actual fucking _work_, got that fucking memorized? Now _shut the fuck up._"

There wasn't much Demyx could do besides pull himself to his feet and try to keep quiet, though the vague anxiety he'd been feeling all along had solidified into a cold dread. In theory, he could get the mission scrubbed by returning to the castle and saying Axel had attacked him, but not only would that actually make the bad feelings worse all around, if Axel could convince them that Demyx had been the one acting erratically, one punch could be written off as justified. And it wasn't like punching Axel back would make anything better. All he could do was grit his teeth and keep his mouth shut, knowing full well they were cruising for disaster.

* * *

><p>To be honest, Roxas would have been more than happy to scrub the mission and go home. Not because he actually believed Demyx's paranoid rambling, but because he felt lazy today and wished he could go back to the castle and sleep in. But if Axel was willing to knock Demyx flat by way of saying no, Roxas wasn't about to risk his face by pushing the issue. It was just a shame Demyx was too chicken to use that as an excuse to go home and get the mission called off, because between the paranoid asshole and the violent asshole, this was <em>not<em> going to be fun.

They were finally coming to the first tiny little hamlet on their list, an unlovely collection of maybe ten houses and a church. If the forest they'd traveled through had been boring, the town was so plain as to be simply ugly, just dirt and mud and plain wooden houses without a splash of paint or a hint of decorative carvings, and the church was just as boring and ugly as the houses. There weren't even any flower gardens as far as he could see. It was almost as if the place had been designed to be as unattractive as possible - it would almost have been more attractive if it had been more aggressively ugly. Falling-down shacks would have been more visually interesting. "Welcome to Boringworld; please don't enjoy your stay," Axel muttered, eyeing a woman who was busy working in a vegetable garden - her face was pretty enough, for all it could use a wash, but her clothing was as bland and unappealing as the house the garden was next to. Apparently these people had never heard of dyed cloth any more than they'd heard of house paint, or for that matter, flattering clothes; she might as well have been wearing a floor-length potato sack with sleeves, tied at the waist with a piece of rope. And her hair was cut brutally short, probably to keep it out of her face; the cut certainly didn't flatter her. She was still probably the most desirable woman in town, which didn't speak well for the other women. Roxas wasn't really in a position to judge the appeal of the men, but judging from the scowl on Axel's face as he looked around, there weren't any real standouts there either. "Jesus Christ on a carnival ride, I almost wish I had scrubbed the mission."

The novelty of that particular expression might have gotten a chuckle out of Roxas back at the castle, but the bleak, bland surroundings had his temper too far on edge to care enough to comment. Since Axel was _much_ bigger than he was, he turned his sour mood on Demyx, who was kneeling in front of the potter's house, examining a small cluster of pots that were just as bland and boring as everything else. "No smart comment from you?" he growled, tempted to give Demyx a kick in the rear just to be spiteful, except they might break a pot and get in a world of trouble. "Axel's IQ has dropped far enough that he might actually be agreeing with you now."

"Shut up. I'm thinking. You should try it sometime." Demyx set down the pot he'd been looking at and straightened up, not even bothering to dust himself off. "As far as scrubbing goes, I still think it would be the best thing to do," he said, his expression and voice equally grave. "The more time we spend here, the more convinced I am that -"

"I said _almost_, chickenshit," Axel said, shoving Demyx hard enough to make him stumble. "Jesus. Fucking coward. I only said that because this place is so damn boring. Not because I'm scared of my own fucking shadow."

"Absence of fear isn't bravery, you walking dick, it's stupidity," Demyx growled, pointedly turning his back; Axel only shoved him again, nearly knocking him over. "Do that again and I'll break your arms."

"And I would just _love_ to see you try, chickenshit."

"Don't make me."

"I couldn't. You wouldn't, you fucking coward; you don't even have the balls to eat anything that used to breathe."

"If you had enough brains to stuff a walnut shell, you'd realize you're proving me right."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"That you're an idiot."

"Would you two shut up?" Roxas snapped, not having the patience to listen to those two bitch at each other anymore. "If we're not gonna call off the stupid mission, then why don't we do something really creative like actually _finish_ the damn thing so we can _ever_ go home, instead of just having another little bitchfight every five minutes?"

Axel turned at that, with the clear intention of rounding on him next, but Demyx spoke first. "Don't even start, Ax. You know he's right," he said in a bleak tone. "It's finish the mission or scrub it, and you didn't seem eager to scrub it. And there's not enough to this ugly little burg to hide a shrunken Shadow, so..."

"Fine, you stupid jackasses," Axel muttered, turning back around and pointedly refusing to face either of them. "If you're in such a hurry to go, let's go." Roxas only grunted in response, unable to even bring himself to be grateful that Axel was finally doing something _not stupid_. He didn't notice the fact that not a single townsperson had so much as looked up at the bickering strangers, or the deeply frightened look on Demyx's face.

* * *

><p>Demyx was actively avoiding his friends as much as he could in the circumstances; Axel would take any excuse to hit him now, and even Roxas was getting a lot rougher and pushier. Demyx himself was having to resist the urges to start getting violent as well, and he knew there was something wrong that was making them all act like that. And it wasn't as though something was making them act unnaturally, or do anything that they wouldn't do without enough provocation in any world; it was just that they were all a little bit crankier than usual, their nerves were a little bit more raw, their tempers running a little bit higher, everything just a little bit more aggravating, and barely halfway through the mission, the effects had compounded to the point where Demyx was afraid that if he mentioned one more time that there was something wrong, the response would be a serious beating.<p>

If only he could pinpoint what was wrong, if he could hold up some evidence and say "_this_ is why we've been acting like a bunch of assholes all of a sudden, it's not really us, it's something about this world that's doing this to us", maybe he could convince them...

Maybe he should just go back and tell the Elders that his partners had both become inappropriately aggressive; thanks to Axel, he had the bruises to prove it. If nothing else, it would get them the hell out of here, and once out of here, Axel and Roxas would hopefully go back to normal. And it would get them out of here before Axel decided any excuse was good enough to beat the shit out of either of them, or before Demyx lost control of himself completely. But for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to do it; not only did he not want to be seen as a coward and tattletale, some stubborn part of him demanded to find out just what the hell _was_ wrong with this world, or at least see the mission through to its end. And try not to get killed by his own best friends in the process.

They were arriving at another town now, supposedly the largest city in this world, though it would have barely counted as a city at all where Demyx was from. As usual, he was hanging behind Axel and Roxas, watching them argue about...something; he didn't care enough to inquire what. Since he'd started making a real effort to avoid any and all arguments as much as possible, the two of them had barely been able to stop fighting long enough to eat, sleep, or kill Heartless. For the most part, Demyx was grateful that his poor hearing meant he couldn't make out most of what they said unless they got too loud, but he'd picked up more than a few bruises from intervening when things started to turn violent. It was so very tempting to let them beat each other up, except with their weapons, it was too likely to turn deadly...but they were splitting up now, to explore the city and hunt Heartless separately, which gave Demyx all the excuse he needed to get away from them for a while. Trying to pretend he didn't hear the names Axel and Roxas were still shouting back at each other, he started looking for the marketplace, thinking he might already know what was wrong.

As he went, he kept a close eye on the buildings and people he passed, looking for a scrap of decoration, a drop of paint, a splash of dye, a single glimmer of jewelry, any sign of any attempt to beautify a single building or a single person. There was no such thing. All the buildings were nearly-identical blocks of wood and plaster; doors and shutters were as plain as plain got, and there wasn't so much as a bit of carving or a pot of flowers to spruce up a single one of them. There seemed to be no distinction between the houses of the poor or the wealthy, assuming there was any distinction between the poor and the wealthy to begin with; everyone was wearing the same nearly shapeless, ill-fitting, undyed clothing, and he was willing to bet that the quality of the fabric didn't vary either. It was almost like a medieval police state, complete with enforced conformity - maybe some sort of religious law in effect - but people in police states, religious or purely political, tended to be vigilant and wary, eager to turn in their neighbors to save their own skins and incredibly suspicious of strangers. The people here...it was like they didn't even see him. Any more than they'd seemed to see him and Axel, when they'd started fighting in that first town they'd come through. Or maybe they did, but they simply didn't care. And people in police states were never so slovenly; everyone had their hair roughly chopped short, and men seemed to hack their beards something resembling off whenever they got inconveniently long. Stained clothes abounded, as if people couldn't be bothered to clean them when they got dirty, and he hadn't seen a woman yet who sported a little makeup or a bit of jewelry or took any sort of effort to make herself look nicer. It wasn't a police state - more of a no-one-gives-a-damn state. When he passed a church, he did a quick check inside just to be sure. It was not only empty, but dark, dusty, and ill-kept, as if no one gave a damn about their faith either.

The marketplace confirmed his worst fears. It was exactly like a thousand other marketplaces in a thousand other worlds, except no one was actively trying to sell their wares. No one was bragging about how fresh their vegetables were or how beautiful their rugs were or how their medicine would cure all your ills, sounds that always made a normal marketplace ring; in fact, the shopkeepers barely spoke at all, just stared lazily at the passerby while making no attempt to get their attention. It was as if they didn't honestly care whether anyone bought their stuff or not. As a test, he went from stall to stall, examining everything from carrots and onions to clay jars to woven blankets to wooden chairs to carving knives; not a word was said to him, even when he "accidentally" dropped a small clay jar and smashed it. And just like with the clay pots and jars in the first little town, everything he saw was eminently useful, but no better than serviceable. It was a flaw that went much, much deeper than merely being plain and simply made; even the simplest things, made with love, were minor works of art. These goods were all made with skill, but there was no pride in any of them, no artistry, no beauty. They were just...things.

And he hadn't seen any jewelry stalls, booksellers, cosmetics sellers, or musical instruments. The stalls sold only what was necessary for life, and none of what made life more worth living. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen a single prostitute in the whole city, and there were prostitutes somewhere in virtually every city in the worlds. He hadn't even seen many children...

And out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of imminent disaster. A little boy who looked barely old enough to walk had managed to climb up onto a stack of boxes, and was now peering curiously into a rain barrel - a rain barrel that Demyx could tell from here was more than full enough to drown him. And no one seemed to be watching him. Dropping the roll of cloth he'd been examining, Demyx raced over just in time for the boy to lose his balance and fall into the rain barrel - and no one noticed, and no one cared, including at least five women who seemed the right age to be the boy's mother. But Demyx had noticed, and he did care; climbing on top of the boxes himself, he managed to lean over far enough to grab the boy and pull him back to safety, using his powers to dry him off as he started crying up a storm. Even then, no one seemed to notice or care, but once back on solid ground, the boy started toddling off towards one of the women Demyx had noticed earlier. Presuming that this was the mother, Demyx shepherded the little boy over, expecting to at least be thanked for his efforts, but before he could say a word, the woman smacked the still-crying boy. "Quiet," was all she said as she took his hand and dragged him away, leaving Demyx standing there with a cold, ugly chill running down his spine.

_Come to think of it, I haven't heard a word of song or a note of music here either. Not even birdsong. It figures._

"You dumb bitch, your son could have died," he whispered at their retreating figures, feeling sick to his stomach. "And you don't care at all, do you...you don't care at all...you don't care..." Stumbling away from the scene, he tried to find a bench or something to sit on, but the most he could find were the boxes by the rain barrel. Well, they would do in a pinch; sitting down on the most convenient box, he hid his face in his hands for a moment, trying to find some way to deny what he'd just figured out. But he couldn't; it made too much sense. Too much ugly, horrible sense. He'd never heard of such a thing happening; he hadn't even known it was possible. But it was the only thing that made sense, with this subtle, horrible sense of _wrongness_.

"Oh, _there_ you are. I thought you'd shit your pants and run home crying." Those friendly, comforting words were accompanied by a smack upside the head, that Demyx had to will himself not to return. "Having fun sitting on your fat, lazy ass all day?"

"Shut up, Axel," Demyx groaned, uncovering his eyes and trying to glare up at him. "I told you this world was fucked up. I just figured out how fucked up it was."

"Not half so fucked up as you are," Axel growled, yanking Demyx roughly to his feet. "If you just came up with another excuse to go home, don't waste your time, I don't wanna hear it."

"You should just send him home," Roxas said, poking at Demyx with a Keyblade. "I mean, if you want the operative definition of 'mentally unfit for duty', you're looking -"

"_Shut up!_" Demyx bellowed, suddenly unable to take it anymore. He'd proven to himself he was right all along, he'd found out just how deeply screwed up the world really was, and he was _not_ in the mood to hear any more shit about it. "Blessed Gods, what the _hell_ is wrong with you two? And get that damn Keyblade away from me!"

"You are what is wrong, you dumbfuck!" Axel roared, shoving him into the wall. "Here we are, working our Goddamn asses off, and -"

That was one step too far. Demyx had taken just a little too much abuse unanswered these past few days, and that shove was the last straw. Without even thinking about it, his fist shot out and nailed Axel in the jaw; Axel dropped like a ton of bricks, leaving Roxas staring up at Demyx with a kind of stunned fear. "What the hell are you looking at?" Demyx demanded, his last thread of patience long gone. "Here - pretend to be useful and drag this jackass back to the castle. And stay there. I'm sick of both of you. And as long as he's down, I'm senior man now, so fucking _do it. Now._"

He'd been expecting another fight, but apparently, and thankfully, he'd scared Roxas enough that he wasn't risking another fight. Instead, he obediently dragged Axel around the corner, into enough privacy to make an unseen portal, while Demyx stood there and glowered threateningly at them. He stood and watched until they'd disappeared, until enough time had passed that he was certain Roxas wasn't coming right back, then turned his back and made for the central square of the city. In places that had such a thing as civic pride, there might have been a fountain of some sort in the middle of the square, maybe fancifully carved and topped with a fine statue, but here, there was nothing but a communal well. Demyx went to sit down beside it, thinking he might feel better closer to water, but as he approached, that same cold, ugly chill returned, and only intensified the closer he got, until by the time he actually reached the well, he could barely take a step without cringing and shuddering. It was all wrong - there was no way a simple, ugly well should make his skin crawl like that. When he reached down with his magical senses to "touch" the water, he came very close to being sick on the spot. The rest of the world was bland and ugly, but this - this was absolutely vile.

_Then again, it makes sense. If something has been sucking all the beauty out of this world...and not just the obvious beauty, but the ability to feel pride, the ability to care, the ability to love...the ability to create and experience beauty...it's even drained away all the natural beauty of the world. No wonder everything is so fucked up._

_And it's something in the well. Something in the water. Well, bad luck for whatever it is._

Summoning his sitar, he cradled it close to him for a few moments, enjoying the care and craftsmanship of its construction and the beauty of its decoration - probably the first real beauty this world had seen in years. Then, gritting his teeth in determination against the ugly task ahead, and comforted by the thought that his friends were now back at the castle and safe from whatever he might accidentally unleash, he started to play.

_Come to me,_ his song called to the water in the well - the filthy, disgusting, sickeningly tainted water. _Come to me. You are toxic, you are tainted, you are poisoning this world - but this is not how you were meant to be. You are meant to cleanse, meant to nourish, meant to sustain life instead of destroy it - come to me, and I will heal you. I will make you pure._ And as he played, a thin coil of water reached up out of the well, curling around his shoulder; despite the fact that it looked like normal, clear water, he nearly vomited when it touched him, but somehow he kept his composure and kept playing, drawing out whatever indescribable taint was in it and leaving it clean and pure. As he'd feared, it was a sickening task to try to purify the whole toxic well, and he feared what the process might do to him, but it was so very gratifying, to wipe that taint out bit by bit and leave the water clean and beautiful again...to finally bring back a touch of beauty to this sad, fucked-up world...even the work he was doing, trying to dispel this ugly taint and bring some beauty back to this world just because it needed doing and was the right thing to do, was a thing of beauty in and of itself...despite how vile and polluted the taint was making him feel, as the people started to pause and turn around and pay attention to the music, he started to smile for the first time since leaving the castle. When a little girl actually danced a few steps, he laughed out loud.

All of a sudden, all the vileness and ugliness and poison came surging out of the well, like a tidal wave with a mission to destroy, pouring itself into him and flooding his entire body in an instant. Everyone in town heard the scream, but by the time anyone could run over to investigate, he'd already stopped breathing.

* * *

><p>AN: Yes, there will be more to this. I couldn't just leave him there. But if I publish the first chapter, I might eventually finish the second. Encourage me.<p> 


	2. The Beast Below

By the time Roxas emerged in Axel's bedroom, still dragging along the semiconscious redhead, he was already wondering why he hadn't put up more of a fight. Even if he could yell loud, Demyx was such a chickenshit that the size difference wouldn't matter. Of course, he had managed to knock Axel flat with one punch...maybe it was just as well. Demyx could be one scary bastard when he was angry; he might have broken Roxas's nose.

...Wait...what? That...didn't even make sense. Sure, he'd seen Demyx knock Axel flat; that was a little hard to deny, but...why? Demyx had all the violent tendencies of a cupcake. Well, Axel had been shoving him, and yelling at him...Kingdom Hearts, Roxas had even pulled a Keyblade on him. He hadn't hit him with it or anything, just poked him...but still. And that was how it had been the whole mission; from the first day, they'd all been getting pushy and short with each other, often escalating to just plain rough and vicious; as he recalled, Demyx had sort of taken the brunt of it, whether it was because he was the most mild-mannered by nature or because...

"Kingdom Hearts," he breathed, rubbing his forehead. "He kept trying to tell us there was something wrong."

"What are you going on about?" Axel groaned, rolling into a sitting position and rubbing his jaw. "What are we doing here?"

"Blame Demyx," Roxas sighed, still trying to put all the facts together himself. "After he coldcocked you, he forced me to drag you back here."

"Jackass," Axel muttered, pulling himself to his feet. "I'm gonna go to the bathroom and check the mirror to see how big of a bruise he left. Then I'm gonna go back there and kick his ass at the earliest opportunity."

"You know, you had just hit him over the head and shoved him into the wall," Roxas pointed out as Axel headed for the bathroom, wanting to ease into it in case Axel was still under the violence-inducing effects of that world. No matter what, he wasn't keen on being the next to get punched out.

"...Oh. Right. Okay, I'll give him the mitigating circumstance." Axel seemed to be addressing his own reflection in the bathroom mirror more than Roxas. "But he was being an idiot."

"Really."

"I mean, going on and on about how there was something wrong with that world and we should just cut and run. Off his Goddamn rocker. It was just another boring world." There was no actual venom or anger in Axel's voice; he seemed to be mostly concerned with fixing his hair and fiddling with his insulin pump. "All right, you kind of expect an artist to be a little bit off in the head, but..."

"Well, he seemed to really believe it," Roxas said, quickly checking Demyx's room through the open bathroom doors. "Of course, the fact that you started hitting him at every available opportunity probably didn't help his mental state any. Though it probably explains why he didn't come home too..."

"What?" Now that definitely got Axel's attention; he checked Demyx's room himself, then turned back to Roxas with a concerned expression. "Why the hell didn't he? I mean, he was the one who wanted to scrub the mission...why would he send us home and not come home himself?"

"Well, his exact words on the subject were 'I'm sick of both of you'..." Roxas pulled himself into a sitting position on Axel's bed, his worry suddenly intensifying. "But he was so convinced something was wrong..."

Axel was shaking his head as he went to his mini-fridge for a vial of insulin. "Was that really Demyx you were talking to? Jesus fuck, what the hell is wrong with him? What was wrong with all of us? We were all acting like a batch of jackasses back there, and now that we're out of that world, it seems so stupid and pointless..."

"I know," Roxas sighed, thinking back on the last few days. "That's probably _why_ Demyx was so sure something was wrong. _He_ realized we weren't acting normally. Why didn't _we_ pick up on it?"

"I dunno, it made such perfect sense at the time..." Axel grunted as he disappeared into the bathroom again with the vial. "But Goddamnit. Demyx _knew_. Why didn't he tell us?"

"He tried, you thickhead; you punched him every time."

"Fuck it..." There was silence for several minutes, while Axel presumably refilled his insulin pump and Roxas just sat on the bed and worried. "Dammit, there's only one reason I can think of why he'd send us home and not come home himself, if _he_ was the one thinking straight and convinced there was something really wrong with the world," Axel said finally as he emerged from the bathroom. "He's going to be out there, playing the hero and trying to solve whatever it is by himself...but he thinks it's so dangerous that he doesn't want us in the line of fire."

Roxas felt an ugly sensation building in his chest - he'd been coming to the same conclusion, but that didn't mean he wanted to hear Axel say the same thing. "So now what do we do?"

"We go back and save his ass before he gets too badly hurt. What did you think we were going to do?"

* * *

><p>The world was every bit as bland, boring, and ugly as it had been when they left, which was no big surprise. Roxas had put the portal right where he said the last one had been, around the corner from the rain barrel and stacks of boxes where they'd left Demyx. Demyx, as might be expected, was long gone, and the old stone streets offered nary a hint of tracks. "Goddamnit," Axel muttered, feeling and fighting the same sense that everything in the world was designed to piss him off. They'd figured out that time ran faster in this world than it did back home, but even so, it couldn't have been more than half an hour since they left; Demyx couldn't have gone all that far. He almost had to still be in town somewhere...the only problem was where. "Okay, so...if you were Demyx, and you'd just kicked us back home, and you weren't going home yourself, you were staying in this boring-ass world...you were convinced there was something wrong with the world, and you were going to be a hero and fix it...where would you go?"<p>

"I don't know; I'm not Demyx."

"Don't start..."

"All right...but you know Demyx as well as I do. Unless the source of the problem was really obvious to him - and if it was, I think he'd have told us at some point - well, what's Demyx most attracted to? Music and water. And I haven't heard any music in this world at all. So other than this rain barrel...where do we find water?"

"...There must be _some_ kind of water supply," Axel mused, thinking seriously about the question. Now was emphatically _not_ the time to get pissy or snide, especially when he knew it was the world doing it to them. "The city wouldn't survive without one. And I haven't seen enough of these rain barrels to do it, even if it rained every day. And there's no major lake, no river...there must be wells."

"Right. And if they're the city's only water sources, they must be fairly high-traffic areas..."

"So follow people who are carrying around jugs and buckets that don't look full."

"Okay, like...that woman? The one carrying the buckets. They're not weighing her down nearly enough to be full."

"After her, then!"

As Roxas suspected, the woman seemed to be heading straight for a well, in the center of town, no less. As might be expected, it was probably the most well-traversed spot in town; there was rather a crowd around it, in fact, as if they were all watching some spectacle...that in and of itself seemed odd, because from what he'd seen earlier, Axel wouldn't have figured anyone in this world could muster up any interest in anything...well, the crowd seemed to be dispersing anyway; maybe it was just a lineup at the well. Though it did seem like there were a few people lingering unnecessarily, as if there was actually something at the well that, wonder of wonders, caught their interest...was Demyx among them? Axel couldn't see him if he was, or hear his sitar playing...it looked like there was someone on the ground by the well, though; it figured that no one in this world gave enough of a fuck about anyone else to offer help to someone who needed it...and there was something else, too, that wasn't a person; something bright blue, which stood out sharply in this world without paint, dye, or blue skies...and Roxas was already off and running towards it by the time Axel caught on to what it had to be.

Demyx was lying on the ground near the well, curled up on his side, his eyes still wide open and staring with an expression of raw horror. But he didn't so much as twitch as Axel and Roxas ran up to him, and his skin was an ugly, deathly grey...no, no, it wasn't. That would have been bad enough, but...he wasn't just an unhealthy grey, he was an _unnatural_ grey, as if he'd been turned into a black-and-white photograph. His hair had gone from dingy blond to dingy silver, and his sea-blue eyes were now every bit as grey as his skin. Out of curiosity, Axel peeked under his robe - he knew Demyx had been wearing a dark green shirt when they left, and he was wearing a dark grey shirt now.

Really, that wasn't important. Was he breathing? That was important. No, he wasn't. How long had he not been breathing? Was there any point in trying rescue breathing now? Well, Demyx was _probably_ dead if he did, and _definitely_ dead if he didn't, so...Axel dragged him a little further from the well, rolled him onto his back (gratified to see that he was still as flexible as a normal human and hadn't been frozen in position), and started mouth-to-mouth, not giving a rat's ass about either of their dignities, only praying that he wasn't too late and he wasn't wasting his time forcing air into a dead man's lungs. All he really wanted was for Demyx to turn back to his normal colors, and start breathing on his own, and _wake up_...he didn't know what Roxas was doing at that moment, nor did he care in the least, as long as he wasn't in the way. And then, suddenly, he heard sitar music.

He looked down; Demyx was still essentially lifeless and colorless. He looked over; Roxas had picked up Demyx's sitar - the blue thing that had gotten their attention earlier - and was playing it with trembling hands. Axel just stopped what he was doing and stared at him, wondering why the hell Roxas would waste his time and effort on that when Demyx - seriously, he looked like - he might be - "Stop staring at me, Ax," Roxas hissed, his expression more than a little frightened. "I just thought it might help. And - whatever that was you were doing -"

"Trying to get him breathing again, you little prick," Axel sighed - he would have liked to growl, but he just didn't have the stomach for it. He would have liked to say more, too, but all of a sudden, he noticed the people around them weren't just ignoring them, acting like they weren't even there...they were actually looking towards them, though mostly at Roxas, as if these bland, apathetic people had some little bit of real interest in what he was doing...

"Well, if you're trying to help him, keep doing it!" Unable to argue with that advice, Axel promptly went back to the rescue breathing, though it beat him what, if any, good it might be doing...Demyx was still, so still, his face still frozen with horror...just breathing for him wouldn't do any good if his blood wasn't circulating, was it? Was it circulating? How would Axel know, aside from the obvious expedient of cutting him or something? Well, from the looks of him, odds were it wasn't...then again, blood was a lot like water, close enough to count as far as Demyx's magic was concerned, or so Axel had heard; maybe it was still circulating on its own...how much did Axel want to bet on that? Not Demyx's life.

_CPR's not gonna work on a Nobody,_ he thought darkly. _It was meant for people_ with _hearts._ But contrary to popular belief, it wasn't meant to restart the heart, just keep the blood flowing...Axel didn't know exactly how a Nobody's circulatory system was set up; maybe CPR would still keep their blood flowing...it was worth a shot. Given the stakes, so long as it _might_ work, Axel needed no better reason to position himself by Demyx's side and start chest compressions. It _might_ work, it _might_ work, it _might_ work, it _might_ work...

All of a sudden, a trickle of inky black seeped out from between Demyx's lips. Axel froze immediately, not sure whether this was a good sign or a bad sign, and the trickle of black stuff welled into a stream, and then into multiple streams from his mouth and his eyes. Axel tried to back away hastily, not an easy thing to do from a kneeling position, and fell flat on his ass as the black stuff coalesced into a dark cloud, and the cloud floated above Demyx's head, and all of a sudden Demyx pulled himself to his feet and stared straight at him, then at Roxas, with the still-growing cloud hovering over him like some twisted, malevolent balloon, anchored at his mouth and eyes.

And then he opened his mouth and spoke, in a voice that sounded like a sick nightmare mockery of the real Demyx. _"Cease this defilement,"_ he hissed, his dark gaze mostly on Roxas. _"I want no more of this filth polluting my kingdom."_ That said, he made as if to take the sitar back, but Roxas wisely scooted away from him, somehow without interrupting his playing. _"I will not have you strangers tainting what I have worked so hard to achieve."_

"Who the hell are you?" Axel demanded, because there was no way that could be the real Demyx speaking to them right now. Something had taken control of his body, and the best he could hope was that the real Demyx was still in there somewhere.

_"I am the lord and master of this world,"_ Demyx hissed, still eyeing Roxas as if he wanted that sitar back now. _"For generations now, I have worked to suit this world to my liking. This is my dominion, and I will not be driven out by a handful of deluded vagabonds."_

...What the hell was he...? "How are we driving you out?" Axel demanded, pulling himself to his feet in case things got even uglier.

Demyx only hissed at him, sounding like a giant serpent, then lunged at Roxas again. _"Give me that!"_ he demanded, grabbing at the sitar.

Roxas, very sensibly, jumped up and ran a few yards off before sitting down and playing again. "Yeah,_ no,_" he said emphatically. "This is Demyx's, and you're obviously not the real Demyx, so...I'm just going to keep it for now. Speaking of which, we'd like the real Demyx back now."

That-thing-in-Demyx's-body blinked at Roxas, as if he/it didn't know what he was talking about, then snarled. _"Count yourself lucky if you escape here alive yourself,"_ he hissed. _"It would be more than you deserve."_

It didn't take bifocals to read between the lines of that one. Scared as hell now, Axel looked around quickly, though he knew there wouldn't be any help for him and Roxas besides each other - these people were probably all slaves of this demon-thing, standing ready to attack as soon as the order was given - and stopped. The people, the uncaring, apathetic, almost robotic people, were gathering around, but they weren't looking threatening or malevolent or as expressionless as ever. They looked - well, it was kind of vague, as if they weren't yet sure what they were feeling or what a feeling was, but for the most part, they looked a little bit scared, and a little bit concerned, and a little bit confused. And the ones looking at Roxas - or more accurately, at the sitar - looked a little bit fascinated, and a little bit happy...

Was it crazy? Sure. But the entire situation was so crazy and so fucked-up that Axel decided it was probably worthwhile to try something crazy and not fucked-up. And if the way the monster kept going after the sitar was any clue, it would probably work. "In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone..."

The monster lunged at him, but Axel sidestepped it easily without missing a note. Clearly, he was onto something.

* * *

><p>Demyx didn't know where he was or what had happened. The last thing he remembered was sensing that all the taint inside the well was rushing at him at once, then a moment of pure agony, then...all of a sudden, he found himself here, wherever here was. It was dark, very dark, and seemed all but featureless, but for some reason its very blankness frightened him deeply. He couldn't see what he was lying on right then; he didn't even know what it felt like, because the texture seemed to change under his hands - one second hard as stone, the next soft as foam, the next more like carpet, the next he didn't even know. He couldn't see what was above or around him, either, though it was probably the same amorphous surface (if surface it was) as was under him. He could kind of see dim, unrecognizable shapes, lighter and darker patches in the surrounding darkness, or maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him. Maybe he'd gone blind.<p>

And why couldn't he summon his sitar? Or a portal? Or one tiny drop of water?

_Maybe I just died and went to this particular world's afterlife. And said afterlife is just as boring and dull as the world itself. I could feel pretty comfortable calling it Hell._

All of a sudden, the darker spots in the all-over darkness seemed to coalesce, looming in front of him like a tidal wave - most likely a tidal wave of destruction, he thought as he tried to struggle to his feet; between the variable "floor" and his own shaky knees, it was an impossible feat. _"Cease and desist, insect,"_ an unholy voice rang out suddenly, from some direction that seemed like overhead, as the wave coalesced further into the outline of a dragon. _"You lack even the excuse of being amusing."_

"Well, then, why am I here?" Demyx asked, the most obvious question that came to his mind right then - he didn't exactly feel dead, after all, though he knew from his own bizarre experiences (though he obviously hadn't really been dead at any point) that you usually didn't. At any rate, this bore no resemblance to any sort of afterlife he'd ever seen or heard about, and if he wasn't dead, and didn't have the excuse of being amusing to keep himself alive, why wasn't he dead?

The dragon rose even higher to loom directly over his head, and Demyx suddenly knew that the dragon was the source of the vile taint, and _was_ the taint, now given form and voice. And he was completely at its mercy. _"Do you imagine I would leave you to continue ravaging my world like a wild beast? I worked for generations to purge this world of its poisons and make it fit to live in, and then you want to undo that work in a week,"_ the dragon said, while Demyx quivered in terror and revulsion. _"Tell me now, who sent you?"_

It took Demyx several moments to find his voice, since it had already run away in fear. "N-no one. No one - sent me," he said, trying to convince himself it was technically true. Xemnas had sent him to the world, true enough, but he certainly hadn't sent him on this particular quest - that was something Demyx had done entirely of his own volition, though what he'd been "ravaging" was beyond him. Maybe this toxic taint-dragon considered any form of beauty in the world a personal assault - and that was just what Demyx had been trying to bring to it. And now he was going to pay for it, in such spectacular fashion...

He had just enough time to brace himself before another wave of agony washed over him, leaving him curled up and whimpering with his hands over his head. This was hardly the first time he'd ever been tortured, but that horrible, sickening _taint_...it threatened to wash everything good, and even every memory of everything good, clear out of him, leaving him little better than a desolate husk, and it seemed to cling to him as if it wanted to seep all the way through him and destroy everything he used to be. It had been one thing to slowly pull it out of the well water, but having it poured into him like this... _"Who sent you?"_ the dragon demanded again, while Demyx tried to gather his thoughts and his happy memories so he'd have something to cling to when the next wave struck.

"No one!" Demyx repeated, and braced himself again, letting a snatch of one of his favorite songs play itself over and over in his head through the next wave. This time, though the pain was just as bad, there didn't seem to be so much of that sickening taint in it, trying to wash _him_ away and destroy him. There was a second wave almost immediately, and then a third, but as long as he could hold on to the music and hold off the taint, the pain all by itself didn't matter so much.

His newfound resistance only seemed to infuriate the dragon. _"Who sent you?"_ it demanded yet again, and Demyx was hit by yet another wave...except this one went on - and on - and on - and _on_ -

He curled up into a tight ball, clutching his head and trying to will the pain to stop. The taint was flooding into him, thick, so thick...it was like being forced to breathe sewage and drink gasoline while being injected with toxic chemicals, all at the same time...he tried to keep hold of that little snatch of music he'd been using to keep himself sane, but the pain was clouding his mind so badly he could barely put two words or two notes together... "No...no..." he whispered, and then "No one sent me! No one! No one!"

All of a sudden, the torture stopped, leaving him lying on the amorphous "floor", unable to do much more than quiver like jelly as he tried to collect his widely-scattered thoughts. If he let himself fall apart now, there would be nothing left to put back together...but the taint had him feeling so sick, so filthy, so defiled... _"So...no one sent you?"_ the dragon repeated, in a vaguely quieter tone, as if it was starting to believe him.

"No...no one," Demyx gasped, trying not to be sick all over himself. "Everything I did...I did on my...on my own..."

_"No one sent you,"_ the dragon said again, seeming to mull that bit of information over in its mind. Demyx could only nod weakly, trying to collect more of his thoughts and more of the song to himself. He'd pretty much lost everything but the first verse and the chorus, but even those were more than he'd had. _"So...that must mean no one sent reinforcements."_ ...Reinforcements? Blessed Gods, Axel and Roxas...had they...yes, they must have. Silently, Demyx began praying that the dragon wouldn't do to them what it was doing and was about to do to him. And then, all of a sudden, from out of the endless dark surrounding him...

"In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone..."

Music. A voice. Singing. Very faint singing, but...blessed Gods, it was Axel. Demyx would know that voice anywhere. And "Molly Malone" was his favorite song - the joke was that it was the only song he knew. He was here, he'd found a way to fight the dragon in the real world...and, as an oddly haunting undertone to the song, he heard a sitar playing. Slowly and inexpertly, but he knew it had to be a sitar - _his_ sitar. And Roxas was the only other Organization member who could play sitar at all...and if he could hear them, maybe they could hear him somehow. It was worth a shot. "And when the night is fallin'..." he began in a feeble, cracked voice, praying that they could somehow hear him anyway. "You cannot find the light...when your dreams are dyin'...hold tight...you got the music in you..."

_"I doubt anyone needed to _send_ you. You are simply a toxic creature, a vile thing fit only for destruction. You will not poison my world again."_

The dragon's black mass swelled suddenly, blotting out even the lesser darkness of the rest of this non-world. The "floor" suddenly vanished, and Demyx fell.

* * *

><p>AN: Isn't this mysterious dragon such a charmer?<p> 


	3. Above and Below

Roxas had seen Demyx looking and acting scary before. He'd seen him collapsed on the floor of the Hall of Empty Melodies, ranting incoherently about his heart and seemingly unaware of the fact that he was too weak to stand. He'd seen him sitting on the edge of Axel's bed, a rope-shaped bruise on his throat and a hollow, dead look in his eyes. He'd seen a strange light and depth in his eyes and a calculating look on his face as he kidnapped Roxas without a second thought to use as a hostage against the rest of the Organization. And he couldn't think of a single one of those times that wouldn't be better than what he was dealing with now.

Then again, this wasn't even Demyx he was dealing with now. This was something that had taken over Demyx's body and was manipulating it like a puppet, something that couldn't be _less_ like Demyx if it wanted to. Sure, it kept grabbing at the sitar, but Roxas was pretty sure it wasn't because it had any intention of playing it.

_At least, as long as the sitar is still here, I know the real Demyx is still alive somewhere..._

"_Cease this travesty!_" that-thing-in-Demyx's-body hissed again, after its frustrated attempt to make Axel stop singing. Just in case, Roxas moved a little further off, clutching the sitar as tightly as he could while he played. "_I will destroy you both!_"

"Big words," Roxas said, since Axel was too busy singing to say anything himself, and he was fairly sure that was more-or-less what Axel would be saying if he could. "You don't seem to be doing anything other than taking swings at us and trying to grab the sitar. And ranting. You're pretty good at ranting too."

"_I could destroy you without a second thought if I so chose,_" the monster hissed, turning to Roxas but not trying to assault him yet. "_Cease your assaults and leave before I so choose._"

"Well, aren't you brave," Roxas scoffed, though he was deeply frightened by the thought of what the monster might be doing to Demyx. If it had taken over his body, what about his soul? He couldn't have simply been obliterated, Roxas tried to reassure himself, or else the sitar would have disappeared... "We're not even attacking you!"

"What are you, anyway?" an old man in the crowd demanded, shaking his walking stick at the monster - the first time Roxas had heard any of the townspeople speak without first being spoken to. "Who told you you was our lord and master?"

The monster whirled to face him, its face twisting with rage and something like horror. "_Now you even turn my own subjects against me,_" it snarled, turning to Axel this time. Axel just kept singing as if he couldn't even hear it.

"Subjects?" an old woman scoffed. "We've a Council of our own! We don't need no body-stealin' ghosts to rule us!" She was closer to Roxas than to Axel, and when the monster turned to face her, Roxas instinctively flinched and gripped the sitar even tighter. But he played all the louder, as he saw how the people were actually _reacting_ now, becoming ever more spirited and lively the longer he kept playing.

"_Silence!_" the monster roared, lunging at the old woman. "_You peasants owe me your lives, even if you are all too stupid to realize it!_"

"Yes, well, I'm sure it was an accident," Axel said in between songs, moving to block the monster with his own body. "Because something tells me you're not really concerned with their well-being. I don't think you're even their lord and master, just a deluded freak." And at that moment, a little girl escaped from her mother, toddling over to Roxas - or more accurately, the sitar. She looked it over with the biggest smile Roxas had seen on anyone in that world before, and finally reached out to touch it with pure, childish fascination. While the monster's face contorted in disgust, Axel only leaned over and started singing right in its ear. "In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone..."

"And when the night is fallin'...you cannot find the light...when your dreams are dyin'...hold tight...you got the music in you..."

"Demyx?" Roxas gasped involuntarily, looking back at the monster - no, it was still a greyscale mockery of the real Demyx, with that black cloud connected to its mouth and eyes. But he could have sworn, for just a few seconds, he'd heard the faintest echo of the real Demyx's voice...

Then the monster turned and grabbed Axel's shoulder, as if it was sinking its claws into him, and Axel started screaming. At that moment, the sitar disappeared.

* * *

><p>Axel had no space in his mind for anything but pain right then. When the monster had started reaching for him, he hadn't thought much of it - after all, he'd come in contact with it before with no harm - and suddenly, it was like being shot full of poison while getting his heart ripped out again at the same time - that wasn't possible, it shouldn't have been possible, but God, the only word he could think of was "toxic". Like it was burrowing into him and trying to rip out everything worthwhile the Heartless had left. Whatever the hell that was in Demyx's body, it was evil, pure evil, and that was the only thing he could think of besides <em>oh, God, make the pain STOP already!<em>

And then, from somewhere out of the depths of his own agony, he heard Roxas screaming. That finally gave him the impetus to shove the monster away and stagger over to him, only to be confused when he saw Roxas staring in horror at his own empty hands. Why would he...wait, hadn't he...and what happened to...the sitar. "...You fiend," he hissed, turning back to the monster as all the implications finally worked their way through. "You beast. You monster. How could you?"

The monster only shrugged, as if he was complaining about it squishing an ant. "_He was rotten through and through,_" it said, as if the answer should have been obvious. "_Anything that twisted is better off dead than alive, and isn't fit to live in the first place. The world is far better off without such a vile thing._"

"Better off...!" Now Roxas jumped up and charged the monster, with nothing but his bare fists. "You murdered him, you -!" That was all the farther he got before the monster latched onto him, and he went silent in an instant, his face a mask of agony. Lacking any better idea, Axel threw a fireball at it; it did no more than sizzle and die out on contact, but the monster let go of Roxas, which was all he'd wanted. "How could you?"

"_It was no more than needed to be done!_" the monster hissed, backing away from both of them, and from the crowd of increasingly angry and frightened people. One little boy wailed, and his mother quickly bent down to comfort him. "_Stop that!_" the monster demanded as soon as it saw her, looking...well, rather angry and frightened itself. The woman backed away hastily, but she still hovered protectively over the child.

The rest of the crowd stirred slightly, as if vaguely upset that the monster didn't even approve of a mother comforting her own child. "Now I think of it, there's not been a murder around here since...well, since I was a lad," one wizened old man murmured. "Been about that long since I last heard a snatch of music..."

"_And for good reason!_" the monster snarled. "_This world was better off without it and the poison it brings! See what only a little of it has done in a matter of hours..._"

"Music don't cause murder, you fool!" an old woman shouted. "It was you that murdered the man who had the guts to play it!"

"Now get out of his body!" Roxas demanded, swinging at the monster with a Keyblade. Unlike Axel's fireball, it connected and seemed to hurt. "He's already dead; you killed him! At least leave his body alone!"

"_He was an outsider, a troublemaker who came only to bring chaos and destruction!_" the monster protested, backing away from Roxas."_If not for him, you would still be going undisturbed about your daily lives, without a care in the world!_"

"Yeah, not a care in the world, not a concern, not giving a damn about anything!" Axel shouted, throwing another fireball at the monster; this one didn't do anything either, but it was distracted long enough for Roxas to give it a heftier clout upside the head. The monster stumbled, but didn't seem any more inclined to release its hold on Demyx's body. "No anger, no hate, no joy, no love - you made complete shells out of these people! You're worse than a Heartless! One Heartless can't steal every heart in a world at once, and at least they might leave _something_..."

The monster continued to back away from them, towards the well in the center of everything. "_See how angry and upset all of you are - as most of you have never been in your lives?_" it asked, seemingly addressing the townspeople. "_It's all the fault of these outsiders! These troublemakers looking to poison this world and ruin your lives!_"

With those words, another song came unbidden to Axel's mind, and he started singing immediately. Music seemed to affect the monster like a weapon anyway, and the lyrics seemed all too appropriate. "Show me how to lie, you're getting better all the time, and turning all against the one is an art that's hard to teach...another clever word sets off an unsuspecting herd, and as you step back into line, a mob jumps to their feet..."

"Keep singing, lad!" someone else shouted as the monster backed off even further, narrowly avoiding a Keyblade in the ribs. "You're killing it!"

"_No! You will not defile my domain any further!_" the monster shouted, lunging at Axel. It caught the back edge of Oblivion in the gut, leaving it folded up on the ground with its back against the well.

"Now dance, fucker, dance! Man, he never had a chance, and no one even knew it was really only you..." The monster was pulling itself to its feet, looking into the well as if it was considering jumping in to escape the sound of Axel's singing...as if that was exactly what it most wanted to do, but something was preventing it, something was holding it back... "And now you steal away, take him out today; nice work you did, you're gonna go far, kid..."

Demyx's body had been lying by the well when they found it, with the monster already inside. Maybe the monster had come from the well. Maybe that was exactly where it wanted to return to right now...except it couldn't. It was stuck in Demyx's body, with all the strengths _and weaknesses_ that came with it.

And it wasn't like they'd have to kill Demyx to destroy it. Demyx was already dead.

"With a thousand lies and a good disguise, hit 'em right between the eyes! Hit 'em right between the eyes!" Axel lunged at the monster with his chakrams without missing a beat. The monster jumped away from that blow just in time for Roxas to get it across the back and send it to the ground. "When you walk away, nothin' more to say - see the lightning in your eyes, see 'em running...for their lives..."

The monster was already pulling itself back to its feet, and the ever-present cloud that hovered around its head was growing, and growing, and _growing_...soon, its entire form was thinly veiled in a cloud of dark fog, that seemed to drip bits of deeper blackness every so often, generating a toxic, polluted aura even the crowd seemed able to feel. "_I warned you_," was all it said as it lunged at Axel again.

* * *

><p>Demyx was still aware of where he was, very cruelly aware. He was nowhere, suspended in the middle of nothing, unable to move, hear, or see. Or maybe he could hear, and there was nothing to hear but silence; maybe he could see, and there was nothing to see but emptiness. It didn't make a difference either way. He didn't know whether or not his eyes were open at all. He couldn't so much as open his mouth or twitch a finger, let alone reach up to see if his eyes were open and his hearing aids were on. He was paralyzed and alone, so far as he knew; he couldn't feel anything, not even a faint breeze or a touch of fabric. Had his clothes been removed? Was he just lying somewhere naked? What was he lying on? He couldn't feel anything under him either, though he knew he wasn't underwater, and he'd surely feel the wind if he was in freefall...he couldn't even feel those stupid strands of hair that always fell in his face. Had his body been completely paralyzed, and been rendered completely numb? Where was he? In a hospital room? In his own room at the castle? Lying on the ground somewhere, being eaten by rats? Trapped in a giant magical crystal, awaiting some kind of fairy-tale rescue?<p>

Simply trapped in an endless void, with nothing to hear and nothing to see and nothing to feel?

_Please, please, let me out of here,_ he begged silently, in case the dragon might possibly hear him and show a fragment of mercy. _I'll leave this world and never come back. I'll do anything you ask me to. I'll crawl in the dirt and eat mud and rat shit. I'll castrate myself and smile while I do it. I'll cut my own legs off and find someone else to get my arms. I'll put my eyes out, cut my tongue out, wash my face in acid, anything, but please, let me touch something again...let me feel something...let me hear something..._

There was no response. There was only the void.

He would never hear anything again, not music, not birdsong, not an alarm clock, not his own voice. And he would never see anything again, not flowers, not waves, not stars, not his friends' faces. He would never taste anything again, not chocolate, not iced tea, not greasy fries, not his favorite curry recipes. He would never smell anything again, not diesel fumes, not perfume, not hot popcorn, not Connie's litterbox - Gods have mercy, he'd have given anything to smell even that, except he knew it was impossible.

He wanted to cry, but no tears would come. He wanted to scream, but he had no voice, and possibly no mouth. He couldn't tell whether he still had a body anymore. Maybe it was just his disembodied conscious mind floating free in the void. Forever.

_Please, please, I'm begging - if there are any gods out there that can still find me wherever I am and have a scrap of mercy in their hearts...please, take me out of here and lock me in the deepest Hell in existence and torture me for eternity...even that would be better than this. I'd rather feel pain than nothing at all. Break me, dismember me, rip my guts out and make me eat them...or just put an end to me. I'd rather die forever than have to live like this. Please, don't make me live like this...please, please, please, just end me...please, don't make me suffer like this...please...end me..._

And despite his prayers, there he remained, alone in the eternal nothingness, wishing desperately and uselessly for the salvation of death.

How long would it take him to lose the final remains of his sanity?

Would he notice when he did?

Would it even matter when or that he did, seeing as it was just him and the void? It wasn't like anyone was going to come up to him and say "Demyx, you've lost your mind..."

_Demyx_. That was his name. That was something he knew. That was something real he could hold onto. If he could hold onto his name, he could hold onto himself.

Maybe this was the real reality, though. Maybe the full twenty years of the life he'd thought he'd had had been one long illusion. Maybe he'd always been this way - just a brain in a tank, just a mind in the void.

_My name is Demyx Kumar Ghatori. The name I was born with was Edmy. I am Number IX of Organization XV. My element is water, and my weapon, if you can call it that, is a sitar. My best friends are Axel and Roxas. Axel is Number VIII, his element is fire, and his weapons are chakrams; Roxas is number XIII, his element is light, and his weapons are Keyblades. My grandmother's name was Lakshmi; my mother's name was Saraswati, but I never actually knew her. I don't know who my father is, only that he's supposedly Australian._

Maybe this _was_ Hell. It didn't fit any description he'd ever heard of any such place, but it fit most of the accepted definitions. Especially the part about eternal suffering in a place utterly removed from everything holy and good. It made perfect sense.

_I have a cat named Connie, short for Consolation. She's a Siamese, and kind of small for the breed. She likes chewing and licking people's hair, especially mine. Axel has a neutered tiger tabby named Sol, short for Solace. He started out as Roxas's cat, and kind of adopted Axel instead. He seems to be able to predict seizures, which is great, because I do suffer from seizures...or at least I did...back when I lived in the real world...assuming that wasn't an illusion...assuming this isn't all that's real..._

It was strange how terrifying it could be, for there to be literally nothing in the universe but yourself and your own mind, and that mind all too aware of your complete and eternal isolation, and most likely doomed to fall apart soon. When would the hallucinations begin? When they did, maybe he could start pretending that they were real, and he'd only imagined the void.

How long had he been here? Ten minutes? Twenty-four hours? A week? A month? A thousand years? Since before the beginning of time? What _was_ time, anyway? When did it begin? When did it end? Had it already ended? Had it not yet begun?

_I'm a musician._

_My name is Demyx Kumar Ghatori, and I'm a musician..._

He was a musician. That, after all, had always been the most important thing. And a musician always had to have music.

Demyx focused, and reached deep inside himself, past all the terror and doubt and burgeoning madness, to find where he kept that all-important music. Even one slim thread of melody would prove that he was a musician, and if he was a musician, that meant he was Demyx, born Edmy, who owned a cat and suffered from seizures. And deep inside, he found not a single slim thread, but an entire deep well of song.

_I have music. I am Demyx. I am real._

_Let music never die in me, forever let my spirit sing...wherever emptiness is found, let there be joy and glorious sound..._

Very carefully, he let his mind slip into that deep well, hiding it away from the endless void outside. As long as there was still music, he would be all right.

* * *

><p>AN: And that is probably going to be the benchmark of author-inflicted cruelty from here on out. Tune in next time to see...what happens next.<p>

"You're Gonna Go Far" belongs to the Offspring.


	4. What Passes for Victory

Roxas could only watch in helpless horror as the cloud over the monster's head swelled into a menacing shroud, and it lunged at Axel with clear intent to kill. Even when Axel started screaming in pain again, he was paralyzed - that dark cloud simply radiated blackness and poison and the death of everything good, and all he could remember was a vaguely acrid scent in the air, and then all of a sudden his lungs were burning and his eyes were on fire, and he couldn't see and couldn't breathe, choking to death on his own blood in some war-torn world whose name he couldn't even remember, only that it started with a P...even as Axel's screams died down to tortured whimpers, no matter how badly Roxas wanted to step in and save him, and keep the monster from doing to him what it had already done to Demyx, he couldn't move. The gathered people were looking away now, losing interest, slipping back into their bland, grey lives...the monster was working its will on them, sapping away their newfound liveliness and concern and turning them back into shells, and there was nothing Roxas could do. The poison had him so utterly terrified he couldn't even defend himself if he had to.

And why should he have to? None of this was any concern of his. So a man caused trouble and died; the only reason he should care is to be glad it wasn't him. Even that wasn't good enough reason - there was no point in caring at all. The only thing that mattered was that he went about his business, and there wouldn't be any trouble...as long as everyone minded their own business and didn't waste time on unimportant things, there would be no trouble at all...and after all this chaos, "no trouble" sounded like a grand thing indeed...maybe not grand, but...well...eh. Something.

..._Hold on a second. My business is hunting and killing Heartless. How is that ever going to not be trouble?_

_Good one, you bastard. But Malenisa's already tried that, and she did a better job of it than you did. And you've already murdered one of my brothers; you're not going to get the other one without a fight._ Gritting his teeth and swallowing hard, Roxas charged that terrifying toxic cloud and lashed out with his Keyblades, aiming for the center of that cloud where he thought the body would be. He struck _something_ solid, and the monster hissed, and Axel fell to the ground and started crawling away. "Leave him alone!" Roxas screamed, circling to keep himself, not to mention his weapons, between Axel and the monster in Demyx's body.

_It's only a monster. The real Demyx is already dead. You can't hurt him; there's nothing of him left to hurt._

"_You are a venomous little fiend,_" the monster hissed, sounding more annoyed than anything; the dark cloud surrounding it spreading out like a pair of unholy wings. "_Eliminating the pair of you will be very satisfying._"

"Yeah, I'm almost sorry to deny you the satisfaction," Roxas said, taking a step back to avoid the monster's lunge at him. "Except for what you did to Demyx!"

"_And if you'd been clever enough to leave, you might have avoided the same fate -_"

"'Twas a bright and stormy evenin' in the chill of late July when the bullfrog took his lady to the glade of fireflies..."

Both Roxas and the monster paused in their tracks - that sure as hell wasn't Axel singing. It was one of the old men, looking rather doubtful and embarrassed, not to mention terrified, but Kingdom Hearts, one of the townspeople was actually singing. And the rest of them were starting to look interested and alert again...some of them had grabbed Axel by the arms and were dragging him out of the monster's reach...and the monster itself looked profoundly disgusted. "_These people are beyond saving now,_" it hissed as the old man rattled off a few more lines of similar nonsense. "_Extensive purging will be required once I rid myself of the two of you, starting with the eldest. But first..._" Roxas's attention had been distracted while he kept an eye on the townspeople who were now tending to Axel, and he didn't see the monster lunging at him until it was too late.

If he'd thought it was agonizing the first time, it was like a soothing massage compared to this. This wasn't just like being injected with poison, this was like having to relive the gas attack, with the poison being forced into him in a way he couldn't prevent or avoid any more than he could avoid breathing, eating him away from the inside out and leaving him without enough breath to scream, and all the while Malenisa's spell was working at the edges of his mind, leaving him unable to care about those he cared about most, tearing away what really made him _him_ and replacing it with what she wanted him to be...docile, obedient, and just as rotten as she was...Axel wasn't moving, and the old man's voice was faltering, and Roxas was going to die like this, and he didn't _want_ to die...

_Demyx...think of Demyx...he was the antithesis of everything this monster seems to stand for...music hurt it, maybe so will thinking of him..._Struggling to focus, Roxas pulled as much of his attention as possible _away _from the pain, onto the past, onto countless bull sessions and late-night meals and sitar lessons...especially sitar lessons...Demyx guiding his hands through a new technique, giving him that hundred-watt grin when he finally got it on his own, playing a demonstration piece and getting so wrapped up in the music he forgot he was supposed to be teaching...none of it more than memories now, thanks to this monster...

"No!" he howled, wrenching himself out of the monster's grip and stumbling backwards, the Keyblades still dangling loosely in his hands. Before he could raise them to strike, the monster suddenly stumbled, looking pained, then went down on one knee, clutching its stomach as if it had eaten something deadly poisonous that was just now taking effect. Had his memories of Demyx had that much effect? Roxas didn't know, but it didn't seem to matter; the only sensible thing to do now was move in for the kill.

* * *

><p>Axel wanted to jump up and attack when the monster grabbed Roxas, he really did. He wanted to start singing again, and distract the monster's attention. Hell, it would have been nice if he could have at least screamed. But he couldn't - that last dose of the monster's poison had left him all but helpless. All he could do was watch as the monster tortured his little brother...it was going to kill him...it was going to kill both his little brothers, and there wasn't a thing he could do to stop it...<p>

Then, all of a sudden, Roxas wrenched himself out of the monster's grip, and stood questionably ready to attack once again. Axel could only lie there and admire his guts...and then the monster went down on one knee, as if Roxas had struck a crippling blow, even though he had yet to attack it at all. Axel couldn't understand why, but he didn't care - if it was weakening, it could be killed. "Keep singing," he begged the old man behind him - no way could he do any singing himself. It felt like the monster had sucked every drop of music out of him.

"'Twas a bright and stormy evenin' in the chill of late July," the man began again, hesitantly. "When the bullfrog took his lady to the glade of fireflies...so blue the red, red roses bloomed beneath the purple trees, and all the fish sang merrily as they swam along the breeze...sorry, lad, that's all the more I can remember."

"Then just sing it over and over!" Axel insisted, trying to struggle back to his feet only to find his legs wouldn't support his weight anymore. "The rest of you - try to join in! It's a simple enough tune, there aren't that many words...if anyone can help him remember what's next, that would be great..."

"The frog, he wore a satin vest and golden beeswool frock, his lady wore a mothwing gown that shimmered as she walked..." an old woman added. "I think that's how it goes. That bit might be later."

"What's satin?" a younger woman asked, sounding genuinely confused.

"Never mind that!" a man - maybe her husband - insisted. "Just try to sing along! 'Twas a bright and stormy evening in the chill of late July when the bullfrog took his lady to the glade of fireflies..."

The monster glared poisonous hatred at them all, but was too weak to do anything to stop them, and their singing only seemed to cripple it further. "_Once I destroy these intruders, I will purge this entire city!_" it hissed, but all the threat its voice might have held was draining away. Even the cloud surrounding it was dwindling. "_I will make you all suffer for allowing yourselves to be so contaminated!_"

"Oh, you do talk a lot, don't you," Roxas snapped, clubbing it over the head with Oblivion. "I hate to break it to you like this, but your game is _so_ over."

The monster collapsed a little further under the blow, but didn't go down all the way. "_I am the master of this world!_" it screamed, sounding increasingly desperate. "_No foreign upstarts are going to unseat me!_"

"There's no need!" another young woman announced, the same one the monster had stopped from comforting her own child earlier - she looked just like every other woman of her age, with only variations in facial features and hair and eye color. "_I_ am the queen of this world! Not some poisonous body-stealing demon!"

The monster stared at her in a mix of horror and pure hatred, and suddenly jumped to its feet and lunged at her, but Roxas tripped it and sent it sprawling in the dust. "You're finished!" he announced, whacking it in the side - a blow that an ordinary human would remember for a month or more. All the while, the people kept repeating the old man's nonsense verses - enough of them that they were almost drowning Roxas out. "They know what you are now, inside and out, and they'll never let you corrupt them again!"

"_Brave words_," the monster scoffed, but the fear in its eyes told a fuller tale. It knew damn well it was broken, defeated, all but dead, only fighting for the sake of the fight. For a second, it looked just like Demyx in greyscale, when he knew damn well he didn't have a prayer but kept fighting anyway...

"No," Axel whispered to himself, finally struggling to his feet and summoning his chakrams back to him. The nonsense chant was growing louder and louder, and the woman who'd just declared herself queen was singing the loudest, taking the lead in directing the rest of them. "He's already dead...you're just a...a _thing_ that's moved into his body."

"_Cease this heresy!_" the monster demanded, trying to pull itself back to its feet as it glared at the people with destructive malice that was totally unlike Demyx and helpless fear that was totally like him. The cloud over its head was little more than a smudge. "_I will destroy you all before I let you poison my world further!_"

"Shut up!" Roxas ordered, hitting it in the shoulder with the flat of Oathkeeper's blade. The monster stumbled and went flat on its back, but Roxas seemed to be waiting for it to attack before he struck again. "You're already dead!"

_Little idiot, no it's not,_ Axel thought to himself, trying to stay on his feet long enough to do any good. Damn it, why wouldn't Roxas just _finish_ it already? He had it over a barrel, he had his weapons out and ready to kill with...but he kept striking with the flats, or the dull edges, never actually landing the finishing blow...as if he didn't want to kill it at all... "For God's sake, Roxas, finish it!" he said as loudly as his voice would manage, trying to make himself heard over the singing. It wasn't enough; Roxas didn't seem to hear him. "Demyx is already dead! You won't hurt him; there's nothing left to hurt! Just kill that thing and end the charade!" he said, trying to raise his voice, but he could barely hear himself. The monster tried to get up, and Roxas hit it again - striking with the flat of Oblivion's blade, another nonlethal blow.

_...God, I don't want to do this either. But it needs doing._

His hands were shaking with weakness; maybe he wouldn't even be able to do this. But he had no choice but to try. Twirling one chakram idly with his fingers, he sized up his target, gauged his trajectory - this would be tricky, with a target lying flat, but doable - and threw it in a careful arc. The monster just stared up at the flying chakram as it sailed lazily through the air and came down, spiked edge first, in the center of its chest.

Black smoke started to curl around the embedded points as the monster screamed. Axel summoned the chakram back to his hand, and smoke billowed out of the holes it left behind, an all-encompassing dark cloud that threatened to grow and expand until it had consumed both of them, all of them, everything in this world, as the monster kept screaming, and screaming, and _screaming_...and then the screaming stopped, and the cloud dissipated as if blown away by the wind, and Demyx's body was lying next to the well, in full color, with holes in his clothes but not a mark on his skin.

_We did it. We actually did it. We killed that thing._

The people behind him instantly broke out in screaming and cheering, except for one little girl who was startled by the noise and started crying instead. Axel didn't care; he just dispelled his weapons and stumbled over to Roxas and Demyx, wanting to share this triumph first with the people who mattered most. But the look on Roxas's face, and the way he was kneeling by Demyx's side and cradling his head in his arms, brought home like a five-ton weight just how empty this victory was - it was only a dead body. They'd saved the world, but they hadn't saved their brother. "I'm sorry, Ax," Roxas whispered, as if this failure was somehow his fault.

Axel could only shake his head for a moment. "...We did it," he finally said, his voice sounding as hollow as the rest of him felt. "We killed the monster that killed him. And we're still alive. I'm sure he'd be happy to know that." Trying to choke back tears, he knelt on Demyx's other side, gently stroking his hair - this was the last time the three of them would be together, before Demyx's body inevitably faded. Maybe the monster hadn't quite killed all the music inside him; he was feeling the urge to sing something, anything, because it was no more than Demyx deserved. But what song could possibly do him justice?

"And the light of a fading star...is what you were, is what you are..."

* * *

><p>It no longer mattered to Demyx how long he'd been trapped in the void. Time had no meaning to him anymore, and hadn't for...for...well, as far as he knew, it had never meant anything; it was just a random string of four letters. Letters...letters, lines, shapes, what did any of them matter? They were things you saw, and sight did not exist. Words and sounds were things you heard, and hearing did not exist. Senses were only an illusion, there to trick you and fool you and keep you from waking up to the nothingness.<p>

Sometimes, though, if he really tried, he could convince himself that he could really see the music. He could _almost_ see it, almost taste it, almost smell it, almost hear it...most importantly, he could almost feel it...

He _could_ feel it. The music was the one thing that was still with him, and had always been part of him, even in this void. When every sense had left him, and his own body had betrayed and abandoned him, the music remained. And in this expanse of lonely nothingness, where he might have otherwise died or gone mad, the music had stayed, keeping him alive and sane. It was part of him - it _was_ him, and he was the music. And he swirled and danced and plunged and soared, weaving grand and intricate melodies across worlds and landscapes and beauties he'd never really been and never really seen, because they didn't really exist...and it didn't matter. He was the music; the music was everything. He was everything, and everything was him.

If words still had meaning, the only word that could have fit the situation was "glorious".

The universe was not an empty void; the universe was him, the music, and he was not a void. He danced, and there was being; he sang, and there was life. He was the being, he was the life, he was the eternal glory. He had no name; he needed no name. There was no need to name him and separate him from anything. He was _everything_. He sang himself into stars, into worlds, into rivers and oceans and clouds and trees. There was an entire universe within him, just waiting to be sung, and it was all him. All the grandeur and beauty that had never really existed suddenly _was_, and was him, just as he was the beauty and the music and everything else in the universe. Everything was one, and he was that _one_, and this one was his - and him - forever. He _was_, and he was the music, and the music was the universe, and the universe was him, and he reveled in the glory of this cosmic unity. His mind encompassed eternity perfectly, because eternity belonged to him; eternity _was_ him. He knew everything, all of time and space, down to the tiniest detail of the arrangement of atoms in the tiniest fleck of dust in this entire vast, beautiful universe. He controlled everything, orchestrated the motion of stars and worlds and clouds, and could rearrange the atoms in that fleck of dust or make an entire spiral galaxy spin the other way with no more effort than it took to think about it. He knew everything, and he controlled everything, because he _was_ everything, a god and a universe in perfect, true oneness. So it was, so it had always been, and so it would be for eternity; he _was_ eternity, and he would have it no other way.

All of a sudden, he _saw_ something.

There was a light before him, a light that was _not_ him, was something entirely separate from him. He reminded himself that it couldn't be there, that sight was an illusion, and waited for it to go away, but there it stayed. This intrigued him - he was everything, and everything was him, so how could the light be and yet not be him? Part of him was tempted to will it away, wipe it out, eliminate it from this glorious universe that was him, because it was not him and did not belong there...but another part of him was curious. What was it, if it was not him? How did it come to be there? Where did it come from? He tried to reach out and touch it (but what did _touch_ mean?) but it eluded him, hovering right there as if beckoning him to follow, and he followed...

_"And the light of a fading star...is what you were, is what you are..."_

That was a _voice_. He'd _heard_ it. That was impossible, and yet, it _was_, and it was also not _him_ any more than the light was. What was going on? What was happening? And he had the strangest sensation...something...something behind him...what did _behind_ mean? And what was...that...oh, _that's_ what _touch_ meant. Something was touching him. He'd all but forgotten what it felt like...

_Felt._

He could feel.

He could see light above him, and hear voices around him, and feel something touching him...touching his back. He had a _back_? Yes, yes he did, and arms, and a face, and ears, and legs, and a whole bunch of other body parts that he hadn't been aware of...he had a _body_. A body that included a nose and mouth...and he could _smell_ something, something that made him think of dryness and dirt...dust. He could smell _dust_. He could even sort of _taste_ it.

His - his - _chest_, that's what it was - flexed suddenly, and air rushed into him - into his _lungs_, another useful body part - in a way that surprised him, and made him cough. It was slightly painful - _pain_, that was another whole new concept - but he welcomed it nonetheless, because having air in his lungs made him feel a whole host of other new things, like _energized_ and _awake_ and _alive_. It also got some of the taste of dust out of his mouth, which was good, because he didn't really like it. Clean air tasted so much better. And he had _eyes_, he realized when he blinked to clear the dust from them. Whenever he closed them, he couldn't see anymore, and when he opened them, he could see again. That was _fascinating_.

"Demyx? My God, are you..." Demyx? What did _Demyx_ mean?

That was his _name..._

Blessed Gods, he had a _name_ now. A name, and a body to feel with, and a mind to think with, and...and everything...but a name was more than just a word that meant "you", names had history, names had stories behind them, names gave definition to the body and the mind and...and the soul...

All of a sudden, he was pulled upright - what was _up_? What was _down_? His inner ears were still sorting that out - and then something was touching him on both sides, hard, more like _squeezing_ - he couldn't figure it out. He was still trying to figure out all the things he was seeing, and try to make sense of them all. What was that all over his body? It wasn't part of him, he knew that...it reminded him of the void, dimly, except it was _there_, it was simply..._black_. Black was a _color_. And those were _clothes_. And there were bodies on either side of him, he realized when he turned his newfound _head_, bodies with faces, that had eyes and mouths and noses like his...these were _people_. Did that mean he was a people too?

He couldn't take it anymore. He closed his eyes and clamped his hands over his ears - _hands_ and _ears_, more new body parts to get used to - and tried to will all these new things and new sensations to go away, or at least back off a little and give him a chance to process them all. Right now, it was just too much. It was enough to drive a man insane.

* * *

><p>AN: Poor Demyx. At least he had some fun thinking he was a god for a while. Now he has to figure out whether or not he's a people.<p>

"Light of a Fading Star" belongs to Flogging Molly.


	5. Shell Game

The marketplace surrounding the well, like most city marketplaces throughout the worlds, was bright and alive with vendors hawking painted pottery and dyed fabrics and patterned rugs and carved furniture. Customers were eating it up - most of them had never seen _decorated_ goods, or even really fine craftsmanship, in their lives, and the merchants were responding with decorations so flashy and ornate that in some cases, they actually reduced the utility of the goods they were on. But no one seemed to mind that these new over-carved chairs were less durable than what they were used to; they were beautiful, and that was all that counted. People were even selling _instruments_ now, everything from basic drums and simple flutes to a complicated stringed creation based heavily on an instrument its creator had only seen once - something the townspeople later found out was called a _sitar_. The Queen's palace - she was supposed to have been a mere figurehead, but the elected Council that should have been in charge had all died of old age while no one cared enough to hold elections, and the Queen had been more than happy to take over for now - stood over the whole scene, its freshly whitewashed walls gleaming in anticipation of more extensive renovation and repair. In the streets below, children played with each other and with brightly-painted toys, their mothers kept a watch on them with one eye and looked for the brightest and most colorful new fabrics with the other, girls and young women gossiped and giggled as they gathered around the well under the pretense of fetching water, young men chattered and bragged and challenged each other to make good on their brags, merchants sang aloud the praises of their matchless goods and bargain prices, and over all the cacophony, a church bell tolled a call to prayer that had been silent for eighty years.

Inside the Queen's palace, in a quiet room on an upper floor, the man most responsible for the life and liveliness below knelt on his bed by the window and watched the activity in silence. Part of him - the part that was trapped for eternity in the great void, unable to see or hear or feel, dying for lack of sensation but never allowed the release of death - begged to be allowed to go down there, drown himself in colors that he'd long forgotten and scents he could no longer identify and sounds that had lost all meaning, and find it all again, put the pieces together that had once made up the person he remembered being, once upon a time, and become that person again. If nothing else, he could go down there and hear the merchants' patter, feel some of those finely woven blankets, maybe even taste some of those apples and grapes and carrots, and take back those precious senses that had been stolen from him for so long, and reintroduce himself to reality. But another part of him, that had gone through the exact same Hell, said _no, you can't, don't you dare, because if you look too closely at a dream, you'll realize it's a dream and wake up_. And waking up would mean waking up from a happy hallucination to the reality of the void, and he could not bear that. He would rather die, except he didn't know whether or not he _could_ die, in that emptiness.

And another part of him whispered _Wake up. There is no need for you to dream. Wake up. The void is not empty; you have filled it with the universe of yourself. Why do you sleep? Why do you dream? Wake up, wake up and sing, and the universe will dance to your music. The universe is your music, and the music is you; that is the reality, for you are all reality, and all reality is you. Wake up, and sing new worlds into being. Wake up, and hold eternity in your hands. Wake up, and remember that you are a god._

For the life of him, Demyx couldn't tell which part was most correct, or most terrifying.

Axel and Roxas were gone right then, trying to finish the mission they'd been sent on in the first place - assuming they weren't a hallucination, and that the entire life he remembered from before hadn't been one long hallucination. They had rooms in a different part of the palace anyway; the Queen had been kind enough to respect Demyx's more fragile condition and gave him a room in a much quieter part of the palace - assuming she was real, assuming the room was real, assuming the palace was real. But since the three of them were the ones responsible for banishing the toxic dragon from the world and bringing it back to life, they were being treated as heroes and given the best of what this world's people had to offer, including the patterned blanket he was clutching, dyed in the wool with rich blue and green dyes from newly-discovered old formulas - assuming the blanket was real, assuming the people were real, assuming the world was real. Assuming it wasn't all a lie invented by his senses, to hide the awful reality of the void.

What if it was the void that was the lie? What if this truly _was_ the reality?

_Wake up. There's no need for you to lie dreaming now. You have a universe to tend. Wake up to your reality_.

That was ridiculous. The man he was in his memories had always been shy, self-effacing, modest, and not without reason. He was certainly no god; he wasn't even given to delusions of godhood.

_Wake up, and remember the wonders you have created - the wonders that you have become. Wake up, and come back to what is real._

It couldn't be. That just wasn't the man he remembered - after all, he remembered a _man_, not a god. He remembered too well being weak and fallible and powerless and helpless - he remembered being trapped in the great void, nothing more than a disembodied soul, praying for death to save him from the nothingness...

And he remembered reaching down inside himself and finding a deep well of music at his center, and he remembered becoming one with the music, and singing glory and beauty until it all became real, and became _something_ where there had been only _nothing_ - he sang an entire universe, and the universe was the music, and the music was _him_, and he was the universe...he could contemplate the whole of eternity at once, and have the attention span left over to guide the life cycles of a trillion stars, and cause a billion tiny coincidences to advance the progress of a billion societies, whether immediately or a million years in the future; it was all the same to him, because he _was_ eternity and a trillion stars and a billion societies and every single one of the millions and millions of people in those societies and so much more besides, and his mind could encompass it all perfectly. He knew everything, he controlled everything - he _was_ everything, and everything was him, a god and universe in perfect oneness, an unending song of glory made real.

Or maybe he was just an ordinary loser who'd snapped under torture and started hallucinating some truly spectacular bullshit.

Or a disembodied soul in the void, hallucinating a whole life a whole life around himself to stave off the cruel reality of his existence, with a brief interlude for delusions of godhood - bounded in a nutshell, calling himself a king of infinite space, and thinking reality was just a bad dream.

Or maybe, just maybe, this was all a dream, and he would one day awaken to find all limits were gone, and that his being encompassed the whole of reality, and his mind encompassed the whole of eternity, and his soul was nothing more or less than the very essence of music...

What the hell _was_ he? God, man, or ghost? And what was real - this world, the void, or his universe-self? If he didn't dare trust his senses, how would he ever know?

He shifted position a little, pain lancing through his stomach - a sensation he wouldn't have minded doing without, but it was still infinitely better than nothing at all. The same with the weak, shaky feeling whenever he did anything more strenuous than sit up or lie down - it was unpleasant, but it was better than that empty nothingness...assuming the pain itself wasn't an illusion...assuming anything he saw, anything he heard, anything he felt, anything he could perceive was actually real...

"Hey, Demyx."

Demyx turned too quickly to see who it was, and flopped dizzily back on the bed, watching the ceiling spin overhead. When Axel set down the tray he was carrying and sat down next to him, laying a hand on his forehead, Demyx simply closed his eyes and let his other senses take over; the sensation of human contact entranced him, even if it was all his imagination. "Roxas will still be out hunting Heartless for a while," Axel said, as if he had no idea what was going on in Demyx's mind. "He made me come back early to check on you and make sure you were still okay. I stopped by the kitchen and got some food while I was at it. It's nothing special; apparently they haven't rediscovered gourmet food here yet, but at least it's vegetarian...for God's sake, Demyx, please, eat something." Demyx was surprised to hear cracks in Axel's voice suddenly, and he could sense something else...he couldn't define how he was sensing it - it wasn't like smelling, wasn't like tasting, wasn't like touching, certainly wasn't like seeing or hearing, but he knew there were little drops of water running down Axel's face. He opened his eyes to find Axel leaning over him with a frightened, distraught expression, more drops of water - _tears_ - coming from his eyes, often steaming away before they had a chance to fall. "We thought you were dead before...you can't starve yourself to death now...it wouldn't be fair..."

What if Axel was just a hallucination? What if he'd never been anything but a hallucination?

What if Axel was real, and a real, thinking, feeling person too, just like Demyx thought or imagined he was? What if he was right?

What happened whenever he tried to eat in a dream? Unless it was a dream pulled straight from a memory that involved eating, he always woke up before he could eat a single bite. And he was pretty sure this wasn't one of those dreams, otherwise it would be set in a world he was more familiar with. That was why he'd solidly refused to even go near food; if this was just a dream, and he tried to eat, what would he wake up to? Godhood or waking death? The thought of that horrible conscious oblivion terrified him so badly that he wouldn't even consider risking it, no matter how his stomach ached and cried for food. He'd rather feel pain than nothing at all.

...What would happen if he died during a dream? He'd wake up in reality, wouldn't he? So if he starved to death in this dream, he was going to wake up anyway; he wasn't doing more than postponing the inevitable. And if it so happened that this was reality...well, then, he'd be dead. He didn't _want_ to be dead. This world was more steps down than he could count from divinity, but it was so much better than nothing...and if he really, truly died, well, there went his shot at re-learning how to walk and talk and get used to having a body again. He wanted to get back to being a human and enjoying all these sensations that he'd been denied for so long. Which included the taste of good food.

What if he woke up to the void? He would lose all semblance of sanity, almost instantly...

What if he woke up to discover he was, in truth, a god?

If he woke up to find the void, he might start hallucinating again at some point, hopefully when he could lose himself in it completely. And if he woke up to find he was a god, well, then, it wouldn't matter too much; he could surely incarnate himself as a human for a while if he got curious again. And if he really had been human all along...his stomach was killing him. Almost without thinking, he reached towards the tray Axel had set aside, and the loaf of bread he saw there. Axel handed it to him, with an almost disbelieving smile, and Demyx took a moment to just hold it in his hands, enjoying the comforting smell and the feel of the thick, rough, crust...and secretly scared to death of what would happen next.

_You can't put it off forever. You have to wake up sometime_.

Very carefully, he broke the loaf in half, pausing a moment to enjoy the resulting burst of scent - or was he only hesitating, trying to delay the next step? Anxiety was weighing on him, almost crushing him, as if his fears had made themselves physical and piled on his shoulders; it took a tremendous effort of will to break off one small piece of bread and finally put it in his mouth.

It was delicious.

Once that first all-important bite was out of the way, the next challenge was not to start stuffing bread in his mouth as fast as he could swallow, tempting though it was. He was so achingly _hungry_, but some part of him still remembered that eating too fast would just make him sick, which was not a sensation he was in a hurry to rediscover. His stomach still ached, as if it wasn't sure how to handle food after being so empty for so long, but the taste of the bread was so _good_; even if he had to pace himself, he didn't want to stop eating...the taste grounded him in reality, one specific reality, as nothing else had or could. It woke him up, truly woke him up, to discover he'd been awake all along.

_Ifsobe I am hallucinating in the void, I'll continue hallucinating; I don't ever want to wake up to that. And if I am a dreaming god, I'll continue dreaming; time will wait for me while I sleep. Whatever reality is really real, I'm going to live in this one. It's real enough for me._

His troubles weren't nearly over. Even though he could make sense of all the words people said now, he didn't remember how to say them himself, and the complex balancing act involved in walking was beyond him - both crucial parts of functioning in this world. And he just knew that deciding to accept this reality as the real thing wouldn't make the other two stop nagging at his mind and haunting his dreams. But there was so much to relearn and rediscover here, and he was just getting started...

Demyx sat up a little further and gestured at the one of the bowls that was still on the tray. Axel simply handed him the whole tray and kept one bowl for himself, but Demyx didn't mind - it gave him a chance to examine the tray, and observe the interesting patterns in the wood. And there was a _spoon_ on the tray, too, carved out of the same kind of wood; the curves in the spoon made the patterns in the wood grain really fascinating. It felt very nice, too, smoothed and sanded and very easy to hold. But the soup smelled so wonderful, he just had to give up his examination of the spoon and use it to taste some. The motions felt strange and awkward, and half of it spilled back into the bowl before ever reaching his mouth, but the little taste of warm, flavorful soup made the hassle worthwhile. He repositioned the spoon in his hand, trying to more closely match what Axel was doing, and found things became a little less awkward. And having the tray made keeping the bowl itself upright much easier; Axel seemed to hold it so comfortably without one, but Demyx just didn't know how, and he'd already found out from the first time Axel tried to give him a bowl of soup that the bowl absolutely had to stay upright...

"How's the soup?" Axel said all of a sudden.

Demyx wanted to answer, he really did, but he didn't know how. Axel spoke so easily and so naturally, as if he barely had to think about the intricate motions involved...whenever he tried, Demyx's tongue felt about as agile as the spoon. He knew all the sounds involved, but trying to make them...it wasn't fair. He used to know all this, and it had been stolen away...he had to get it all back somehow. He had to. Now...how did it work? What were the motions? What turned the sounds into _words_? He tried once more to speak, but all that came out were more croaking and hissing sounds... "A-ah...ah...isss...sss...ssg-g-goooood."

...Hold on a second. That almost sounded like _words_.

He looked up at Axel, to see how he reacted, to see if he approved, to see if that had been good enough. Axel was just staring at him in disbelief, which concerned him, until he started to smile a little bit. As the smile grew into a huge grin, Demyx couldn't help but smile back at him. "I'm glad you like it," Axel said, his voice sounding oddly choked. "I'm glad you're back."

"G-g-gllllllaaaa-d t-t-to b-b-be b-b-ba-aac-k." Blessed Gods, even to himself, Demyx sounded like he'd had a stroke or something, but as long as he could get out something like coherent words, it was good enough for now. He'd try to do better later. He'd try that walking thing again tomorrow. This reality had endless wonders to rediscover, but for now, he'd settle for a few words and a bowl of soup. It wasn't godhood, but it was good enough.

* * *

><p>AN: Poor Demyx. He's awfully broken this time around. Repairing him will be a job and a half and then some. Fortunately, he's not irreparable.<p> 


End file.
